I started my journals years ago, and then this blog, not to teach others, but as a way for me to contain and recall and live out the treasures of heaven. Like Samuel, the young prophet, I don't want to let the word of the Lord fall to the ground; I want to hold it in my heart, turning it over and contemplating what I am given each day.
Each morning, the Holy Spirit seems to hover over my vast library and select one small reading which reveals to me --- or confirms to me -- truth He has already spoken to me in prayer. How He can direct my attention to one paragraph out of one book out of the many, many books in my house, and how that one small passage can speak to the particular issue of the moment in my life has always been a wonder to me. Only the Spirit of God can move over the waters of our lives this way.
Yesterday, the reading from von Speyr (whose book was lying on the floor next to my bed, but which I had not been reading for some months now) shed the most brilliant and clarifying light on something I had been wrestling with for days. The few paragraphs I "happened" to read at random illumined the issues of my heart and soul in a way that brought me peace and joy and thanksgiving. This is the way the Holy Spirit uses Scripture, if we allow Him to do so -- not studying it to be brilliant, but studying it as a search for the wisdom we need for our lives.
This morning, I happened to open von Speyr's book to the middle and read something that I believe is not so much for me as for someone else; I know not who. But the words of the passage seemed to catch fire for me as I read them, so I offer them to whomever might read this today. Von Speyr had been writing of a young person, a young adult who is learning to pray, really pray, for the first time -- but I think her words apply to all of us entering into the world of prayer:
He must unite his life, also, to his gift of prayer....He must gather up his whole life and spread it out before God, offering it to God whole and receiving it back from God whole, inbued with a new meaning. His prayer was training, and now the question is: for What? For a life, certainly, which is to belong more and more to God. Although he cannot demand that God reveal his will to him at every moment in every detail, he does know that if he offers his life wholly to God, he can be entrusted with a mission from him which will be the core and content of his llife and which will provide the orientation for his activity....
Up to now the person praying has thought primarily of his own concerns and brought them to the Lord. Now he sees that the Lord comes to him with his divine concerns and wants to appropriate his life for those purposes. He has experienced the Lord's blessing upon his personal life. Now he must allow the Lord enough room that the Lord will bestow on him his mission as well.
--The World of Prayer, pp. 142 & 145
When we reach the point in our prayer of which von Speyr writes, our life becomes prayer and our prayer becomes our life; there is no longer any distinction between the two.
Amazingly, when I was in high school, struggling with the what constituted prayer, I wrote a poem which is lost to the mermaids of Katrina. There was a line in it that I recall, "A life of love, if love, is prayer." I do still believe that. I also believe that we have to open ourselves to being loved as a form of prayer. Your entry said it all so eloquently. Thank you.
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